New ultimate grift dropped, Ilya Sutskever gets $2B in VC funding, promises his company won’t release anything until ASI is achieved internally.

Before focusing on AI he was going off about what he called the rot economy, which also had legs and seemed to be in line with Doctorow’s enshitification concept. Applying the same purity standard to that would mean we should be suspicious if he ever worked with a listed company at all.

Still I get how his writing may feel inauthentic to some, personally I get preacher vibes from him and he often does a cyclical repetition of his points as the article progresses which to me sometimes came off as arguing via browbeating, and also I’ve had just about enough of reading performatively angry internet writers.

Still, he must be getting better or at least coming up with more interesting material, since lately I’ve been managing to read them all the way through.

What else though, is he being secretly funded by the cabal to make convolutional neural networks great again?

That he found his niche and is trying to make the most of it seems by far the most parsimonious explanation, and the heaps of manure he unloads on the LLM both business and practices weekly surely can’t be helping DoNotPay’s bottom line.

i think yud at some point claimed this (preventing the robot devil from developing alignment countermeasures) as a reason his EA bankrolled think tanks don’t really publish any papers, but my brain is too spongy to currently verify.

I don’t think him having previously done undefined PR work for companies that include alleged AI startups is the smoking gun that mastopost is presenting it as.

Going through a Zitron long form article and leaving with the impression that he’s playing favorites between AI companies seems like a major failure of reading comprehension.

It’s adorable how they let the alignment people still think they matter.

Is this… the perfect grift?

Surely the free market would never allow this.

So many of the prominent eugenics enjoyers name-dropped in the article have being regulars in ACX in common, as well as having been personally sanewashed by siskind on numerous occasions, that it’s becoming increasingly absurd how he keeps flying under the radar when modern racism and eugenics are being discussed in major outlets.

Like, I don’t see how Cremieux/Lasker/TP0 ever breaks into the mainstream enough to be notable by The Guardian without Siskind making rationalist spaces super friendly to people like him as well as deferring to him and endorsing his writing.

Should be noted that it’s mutual, Hanania has gone to great lengths to suck up to siskind, going back to at least the designer mouth bacteria thing.

And GPT-4.5 is terrible for coding, relatively speaking, with an October 2023 knowledge cutoff that may leave out knowledge about updates to development frameworks.

This is in no way specific to GPT4.5 but remains a weirdly undermentioned albatross about the neck of the entire LLM code-guessing field, probably because the less you know about what you told it to generate the likelier you are to think it’s doing a good job, and the enthusiastically satisfied customer reviews in social media that I’ve interacted with certainly seemed to skew toward less-you-know types.

Even when the up-to-date version release happened before the cut-off point you are probably out of luck, since the newer version is likely way underrepresented in the training data compared to the previous versions that people may have been using for years by that point.

Nothing in my experience with LLMs or my reading of the literature has ever led me to believe that prompting one to numerically rate something and treating the result as meaningful would be a productive use of someone’s time.

Still occasionally think about that bit in the o1 white paper where the openai researchers innocuously pose the question of what if our benchmarks for detecting hallucinations are shit actually, wouldn’t that be something.

Implicitly assuming that the technology to terraform Mars is just around the corner is the we’ll become profitable once we hit AGI of space exploration.

In todays ACX comment spotlight, Elon-anons urge each other to trust the plan:

in order to dissuade hypothetical agents from blackmailing you

There’s also a whole thing with Yud accepting the many worlds interpretation as obvious truth that leads to (some) rationalists believing that getting killed in one timeline helps your surviving parallel selves by bolstering your case of being unblackmailable by said hypothetical agents, who are also from the future, which is why you can’t negotiate with them directly.

Also “return the offense thousandfold” figures in LaVeyan satanism I think (cross referencing unsuccessful; too many black metal bands in search results) as a counterpoint to by far the least observed christian guideline of turn-the-other-cheek.

Vox happens to be downstream of EA money, coincidentally.

Lesbionest, there is no better proxy for polygenic fitness than your total word count at lesswrong and acx.

Baldness just makes you more aerodynamic, and in our eugenics enabled charter city/network state/seastead you’ll be getting assigned a state sponsored waifu anyway (terms and conditions may apply, like being not unprovably not related to persons of dubious genetic heritage).

In a completely unexpected turn of events this new experiment in mainstreaming eugenics is being currently boosted by siskind.

Could also be don’t worry about deepseek type messaging that addresses concerns without naming names, to tell us that a drastic reduction in infrastructure costs was foretold by the writing of St Moore and was thus always inevitable on the way to immanentizing the AGI, ἀλληλούϊα.